I noticed the math on my previous posting was faulty. If you subtract 40 from 10, you get -30. But I didn’t want to be negative, so I dropped the “-” and became 30.

The impetus that I had for starting this blog was to point out some observations I have made concerning genealogy. Cathryn and I are the family history “specialists” in our ward. I laughed when I received my calling (kind of like how Sarah laughed when she was told she was going to have a child). I really felt unqualified. I still do, even though I have taken several on-line courses on new.familysearch.org and one downtown course at the Family History Center.

Right now Cathryn and I are teaching a Sunday School class on Family History. It is going well because the manuals and DVDs that go with them are excellent and because the people in our class actually know less than we do. New.familysearch.org is new enough that we all can feel like we are all in this together for the first time. Which brings me to the point.

Because I am now “into genalogy,” I started watching the PBS 4-part series, “Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” It ended last week, but if it repeats, be sure to watch it. “Skip” Gates was the man who had a beer with President Obama and the policeman who arrested him in his own home--but that’s beside the point. As a Harvard professor he is interested in following the individual histories of people, initially black people. But the program traces the genealogical and in some cases the genome history of a spectrum of people such as Stephen Colbert, Yo Yo Ma, Meryl Streep, and Mike Nichols, among others. For every one of the individuals there were moments of silence and contemplation as they discovered things about their ancestors which they had never known or had never seen before. They were really moments of reverence and excitement.

I recognized those moments. I have had them when doing my own genealogical research, and I have witnessed them with the few people I have been helping with their genealogy.

Another TV program, on commercial, network television, is “Who Do You Think You Are.” I missed the first installment last Friday, but will certainly tune in to it tomorrow. There was an article in the newspaper about, and you can read it on this link: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20100301/ai_n50379949/?tag=content;col1 .

In the article Lisa Kudrow, former “Friends” star and one of the executive producers of the show, talks about those genealogical moments: “And every episode has highly emotional moments when the celebrities make unexpected discoveries about their ancestors.

‘There's a moment of this kind of wish fulfillment in every one of them that's ... I'm going too far, but it's almost like supernatural to me,’ Kudrow said.”

In the Church we always talk about supernatural things, but we call them spiritual experiences. And these spiritual experiences are related quite regularly when we talk about Family History and “the spirit of Elijah.”

In the November 1996 Liahona, p. 19, Gordon B. Hinckley wrote: “There are millions across the world who are working on family history records. Why? Why are they doing it? I believe it is because they have been touched by the spirit of this work, a thing which we call the spirit of Elijah. It is a turning of the hearts of the children to their fathers. Most of them do not understand any real purpose in this, other than perhaps a strong and motivating curiosity.”

Even if people don’t understand, it seems to me that they still are entitled to the “spiritual experiences” that come under the head of “the spirit of Elijah,” as I have observed them on the two TV shows I have mentioned.

In the last book of The Old Testament, Malachi writes, (Malachi 4:)5 “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: 6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”

Moroni quoted this scripture to Joseph Smith and told him that Malachi would come and do what it said.

Thirteen years later it happened. And now, a hundred seventy-four years later, genealogical research has grown to proportions greater than anyone could have imagined, except, perhaps, for a few prophets.